Sanborn fire insurance map, May 1884

The earliest map in this catalog that shows street numbers — and it shows the wrong ones. Charleston renumbered the whole city under a contract of 1882, finished before the earthquake of 31 August 1886, and by May 1884 King Street already carried numbers running to 627, as it does in the 1888 edition. These are modern numbers, not the numbers Cook and Quinby printed on their mounts.

It remains the best sheet for the buildings themselves. Sheet 6 covers King Street between Society and Beaufain — the block the photographic trade worked in — drawn shopfront by shopfront at fifty feet to the inch, nineteen years after the war and two years before the earthquake changed the street.

That match has now been made, at least by block. Two premises appear at corners in both Ford’s census and this survey — Siegling’s music house on the Beaufain corner (251–253 King in 1861, numbered 247 here and still lettered Music Mdse. on all three floors) and Eibe H. Marjenhoff’s at the Liberty corner (333 King in both) — and between them the two schemes differ by no more than about four doors. That is enough to put the wartime galleries on the right block, and not enough to put them in a building.

The sheet repays looking at for its own sake. It marks photographic galleries by occupancy, on the upper floors where the skylights were: three of them on the west side of King in 1884, at 267, 281½ and 283 — the last of these being where George LaGrange Cook, the wartime photographer’s son, was working.